Bread Diary – American-style White Sandwich Bread

It may have been a looooong while since I’ve given you a bread update, but, in fact, since I received that bread book for my birthday last June, we haven’t bought a store-baked loaf since (ok, maybe here and there the odd time). I try to make bread regularly each week. One batch gives us for two loaves; I mix the batter Sunday afternoon, let it rise, then pop the first loaf in Sunday evening and store the remaining dough in the fridge. The next weekend, I put in the second loaf to bake. I actually have it down to quite a science and for the white bread version we usually eat, I don’t need the recipe any longer.

Matt and I are both creatures of habit, and our weekday breakfasts/lunches are fairly plain and simple: a homemade oatmeal or banana muffin to start the day, and a peanut butter (and honey for me) sandwich, an apple, a yogurt, and we’ve got ourselves a lunch. It might sound bland, but we don’t need fancy lunches at the office every day. Plus, the homemade bread makes it special.

Well, it was time for a change, and while I enjoyed the usual white bread, I was looking for a recipe that was a bit lighter; the usual one was kind of dense (but good). Luckily, the bread book has no shortage of recipes, so when I came across the recipe for the American-style sandwich bread, which promised to be a lot lighter, I was excited to try it out. The recipe didn’t differ much, except for the addition of an egg and some sugar, and preparation was exactly the same. The result, a really nice and light sandwich bread for our peanut butter. I was happily impressed and continued to bake it for a couple weeks.

Baking our own bread, we like to think, is saving us some money, but lately we’ve been wondering if it’s worth the effort. I mean, a loaf of fresh bread from the bakery is about $3.00. So, that’s about $6.00 for two weeks. If you take into account the ingredients that go into the fresh loaf, it probably does work out to be less than $3.00 a loaf, but we found out this weekend that lugging home about 15 kilos of flour (it’s better to buy in bulk) has a cost in itself (like a grumpy husband with a sore back…). I’m thinking I might be ready to leave the fresh bread for weekend dinners.